Name: Dana Kraft's review of The Arm by Jeff Passan
Item: The Arm
Rating: 3
Author: Dana Kraft

Jeff Passan

Yahoo’s lead baseball columnist offers an in-depth look at the most valuable commodity in sports—the pitching arm—and how its vulnerability to injury is hurting players and the game, from Little League to the majors. Every year, Major League Baseball spends more than $1.5 billion on pitchers—five times more than the salary of every NFL quarterback combined. Pitchers are the game’s lifeblood. Their import is exceeded only by their fragility. One tiny band of tissue in the elbow, the ulnar collateral ligament, is snapping at unprecedented rates, leaving current big league players vulnerable and the coming generation of baseball-playing children dreading the three scariest words in the sport: Tommy John surgery. Jeff Passan traveled the world for three years to explore in-depth the past, present, and future of the arm, and how its evolution left baseball struggling to wrangle its Tommy John surgery epidemic. He examined what compelled the Chicago Cubs to spend $155 million on one arm. He snagged a rare interview with Sandy Koufax, whose career was cut short by injury at thirty, and visited Japan to understand how another baseball-mad country treats its prized arms. And he followed two major league pitchers, Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey, throughout their returns from Tommy John surgery. He exposes how the baseball establishment long ignored the rise in arm injuries and reveals how misplaced incentives across the sport stifle potential changes. Injuries to the UCL start as early as Little League. Without a drastic cultural shift, baseball will continue to lose hundreds of millions of dollars annually to damaged pitchers, and another generation of children will suffer the same problems that vex current players. Informative and hard-hitting, The Arm is essential reading for everyone who loves the game, wants to keep their children healthy, or relishes a look into how a large, complex institution can fail so spectacularly.

Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports

The Arm

Dana Kraft

Jowanza Joseph

It'll be hard to read a better baseball book than this one. The coverage of arm injuries and the long term look at preserving arms in the MLB was fascinating. I would recommend this book for anyone who follows baseball.

I love baseball, but this book was meh. The chapters about Japan were interesting because I know nothing about their culture of baseball, other than its popularity. I also enjoyed some of the Driveline stuff, although it was notable that he sort of paints Trevor Bauer as an odd genius, but then adds in the epilogue that he had control problems in 2015. I guess my conclusion is that a healthy arm is just table stakes for a pitcher, which seems obvious but it also made the book less interesting. The most interesting part of pitching is when a person is facing the pitcher with a bat, not a radar gun or analytical device.

Dana Kraft &
The Arm by Jeff Passan

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Dana Kraft &
The Arm by Jeff Passan